Tony Cliff

Marxism and the collectivisation of agriculture

1. Introduction

For Marx the Socialist revolution depended on the predominance of large-scale enterprise in industry, commerce and banking, which would make possible the expropriation of the capitalists by workers organised into collectivities in the actual process of capitalist production. He envisaged the embryo of Socialism – the large socialised enterprise – growing inside capitalism itself, ready to emerge complete into life. Marx, as we shall see later, presumed that under capitalism, in agriculture no less than in industry, the victory of large-scale social production was assured, alive though he was to the fact that the impediments in the path of large-scale farming are relatively far greater than those in the path of large-scale industry, and hence that the speed of capital concentration in agriculture is slower than in industry proper.

If, however, history shows that small-scale production continues to be predominant in agriculture, scarcely evincing any tendency to wither away and be replaced by large-scale enterprise, our idea of post-revolutionary agriculture naturally has to undergo radical modification.

This is especially so, as socialism – involving planning and the abolition of the exploitation of man by man – can not by its very nature be envisaged in industry, banking and commerce as long as individual production and competition – and hence planlessness and inequality – prevail in the countryside. The two systems could be visualised existing side by side for a time, both co-operating and clashing with each other. But after a certain lapse, unless the collectivist system were to attain a predominant position, progressively invading and finally undermining the individualist sector of production, the march towards socialism and its eventual victory would be wholly thwarted.

Associated with Marx’s assumption of the victory of large over small farming is a second assumption, that the rural population will become differentiated into ever more clearly defined social classes: a small minority of rich farmers and a growing majority of agricultural workers, the latter progressively freeing itself from the influence and authority of the village nabobs. Marx’s policy was based on an alliance of the industrial with the agricultural working class against the capitalists of town and country.

Now, if the victory of the large over small farm were not as sharply defined as Marx assumed, the process of class differentiation in the rural population would necessarily remain less distinct. It follows that it would be difficult for the Marxist party to find for the industrial working class allies in the rural areas who are not attached to private property and individual farming, and are bent on collectivisation. Having to bid for the support not only of the rural wage-earners, but also for the support of all peasants, would necessitate a basic change in the Marxist concept of the struggle for socialism in the countryside.

Again, Marx foresaw the socialist revolution breaking out in the most advanced industrial countries. Had this occurred, had revolution swept through countries like Britain or the United States, then however incorrect Marx’s prognosis might have been regarding the future of small farming under capitalism, and however unclear the differentiation of agricultural workers – natural allies in the struggle for the collectivisation of agriculture – from the rest of the rural population, the modifications necessary in the policies of the Marxist parties would have been marginal. For agriculture is indeed only marginal to the national economies of Britain or the United States. But when the revolution broke out in a predominantly backward agricultural country, as Russia was in 1917, these difficulties loomed more ominously. One and the same problem, posed in different historical contexts, can have entirely different implications.

Finally, Marx also believed that immediately after the socialist revolution, the highly developed industry of the advanced countries would provide the material resources to help agriculture along the road to complete co-operative organisation. Industry would assist agriculture to develop, to transform itself. Marx never posed the question: What path would agricultural collectivisation follow where it was not enriched by a bountiful industry, but where instead it had to build industry up, where agriculture was exploited to carry out the uncompleted industrial revolution?

The above short, schematic counterposing of Marx’s ideas on collectivisation of agriculture with the actual historical circumstances in which the problem has time and again been posed, rather runs ahead of the story. Let us turn back then, to Marx’s views on the future of agriculture.

2. Marx: The peasantry doomed under capitalism

When dealing with Marx’s attitude to the peasantry, it must be remembered that the core of his research and analysis was the transition from capitalism to socialism. He looked upon the peasantry as a class as a social form characteristic of the feudal order, an untypical survival inside capitalism of an obsolete social order, which capitalism would drive out of existence. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels forecast the doom of the peasantry as of other petty bourgeois groups. Replying to a question on the attitude of Communists to the property of these groups, they said:

Are you speaking of the petty bourgeois, of the small peasant property which was before the bourgeois property? We do not need to do away with it. The evolution of industry has done, and is daily doing away with it.

The International Workingmen’s Association reiterated the same ideas in its Manifesto of 1869, stating that capitalism and science “condemn small-scale peasant farming to gradual extinction, without appeal and without mercy”.

So long as the peasantry and other petty bourgeois groups hold on to their property, they try to “roll back the wheel of history”. The peasantry, Marx wrote, is “the class that represents barbarism without civilisation”. [1] Together with other petty-bourgeois groups, they are not only conservative, but reactionary.

If by chance they are revolutionary, they arc so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future, interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. [2]

Again, in his life’s work, Capital – where, in analysing the capitalist order, Marx used, it is true, an abstract model, and not a picture of existing society (but a model nevertheless that sought to demonstrate the lines along which capitalism was developing) – he found no place for the peasants or for other small producers. They were destined, it seems, to disappear with the advance of capitalism.

However, in further work on the problem, and especially in Volume III of Capital, Marx made some reservations regarding the future of the peasantry under capitalism. When he explained his theory of rent (Part IV of Volume III) he restricted his analysis to the English type of land-ownership and rent. Here there were only three social groups in the countryside: landowners, capitalists and wage workers, a scheme of things which left no place for the peasantry. But he makes it very clear that this is only one model. He ends this section with a short analysis of an alternative model, with small peasant farmers in the role of sellers and debtors subordinated to trade and money capital, and a resulting degeneration of agriculture. He makes it clear that the latter model is a less pure form of capitalist development in agriculture, and he does not state whether, under the continued development of capitalism, peasant farming would be swept away by the victory of large-scale production. Thus it is true to say that Marx, in further elaborating his great work, intended to move the English type of landownership away from the centre of the stage. Indeed, Engels stated in his preface to the Third Volume of Capital Marx intended to rewrite the part on rent, with Russia, rich in a “variety of forms of real estate and the exploitation of the agricultural producer” playing an equal role to that of England in the First Volume, which deals with industry and industrial wage labour. [3] It need scarcely be remarked that the “variety of forms” did not include the English model of large farms.

It would be erroneous to conclude from this, however, that Marx ever abandoned the central theme that small farming is doomed under capitalism: Russia, after all, did not represent a capitalist, but a pre-capitalist, semi-feudal society. On the contrary, till the end of his life Marx took it for granted that small-scale agricultural production was doomed: “Large industry and large agriculture on an industrial scale work together.” [4]

Marx’s conception of the prospects of the peasantry under capitalism must undoubtedly have been influenced by the fact that since 1850 he had lived in the only country in the world where the peasantry had practically disappeared and large- scale farming was predominant.

3. Marx: On the role of the peasantry in the socialist revolution

Marx argued that inside capitalism, that is, after the bourgeoisie’s rise to power, the peasantry is a reactionary force to the extent that it is still attached to property. Thus he says that it was “the relentless property fanaticism of the peasant” which in 1848 isolated the Parisian working class and led to the defeat of the revolution. [5]

Only insofar as the peasant becomes conscious of the hopelessness of individual farming can he play a progressive, even revolutionary role; when

the French peasant parts with his belief in his small holding ... the proletarian revolution obtains that chorus without which its solo song in all peasant nations becomes a swan song. [6]

History was to show time and again that when individual farming was threatened by capitalist development, as for instance in Germany during the great depression of the 1930s, the peasant did not join the proletarian revolution as a “chorus” but sided with its enemies. [7]

4. Marx and Engels on land distribution among the peasants

Because Marx saw in small farming a remnant of feudalism being crushed and swept away under the advance of capitalism, his attitude to private peasant land ownership when it faced capitalist ownership differed from his attitude when it faced large feudal ownership.

It is clear that Marx supported the small peasants’ struggle for the distribution of large feudal properties, while he always rejected the support of small property in opposition to large capitalist property and gave priority to collective production, wherever he believed that it could be established in place of individual production. Collective ownership was to be supported against small private ownership.

The Communist League of Germany’s programme of 1848 stated:

The royal and other feudal estates, all mines, pits, etc, shall be transformed into state property. On these estates agriculture is to be conducted on a large scale and with the most modern scientific means for the benefit of all society. [8]

The Address of the Central Council to the Communist League of Germany, written by Marx in 1850, warned the German comrades against allowing the landed estates to be handed over to the peasants as had been done in the French revolution:

The first point on which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism. As in the first French Revolution, the petty bourgeois will give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property. That is to say, try to leave the rural proletariat in existence and form a petty bourgeois peasant class which will go through the same cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness which the French peasant is now going through.

The workers must oppose this plan in the interests of the rural proletariat and in their own interests. They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remains state property and be converted into labour colonies cultivated by the associated rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale agriculture through which the principle of common property immediately obtains a firm basis in the midst of the tottering bourgeois property relations. [9]

The same idea reappeared in 1869 in the resolution of the Basle Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association on agrarian policy. It called upon the agricultural workers to form a “labourers’ union” which would take possession of state, church, and large estate lands. [10]

Again Engels, in a letter to Bebel on 11 December, 1884, wrote:

The demand should be made that the great demesnes which are not yet broken up should be let out to co-operative societies of agricultural labourers for joint farming. [11]

Thus, while Marx and Engels supported bourgeois peasant property in the struggle against feudalism, they argued that in the socialist revolution, distribution of the large estates among private owners should be opposed, and instead these estates should be transformed into co-operatively run large farms.

Large farming under capitalism is bound to crush small farming out of existence, whether at a quicker or slower pace, entirely or not quite completely;

The defence of small-scale farming is reactionary;

The ally of the industrial working class in the struggle for socialism is the agricultural working class;

The socialist revolution denotes the immediate transformation of large estates into state or co-operative property.

We shall find that Marx’s followers – Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky – in the main followed Marx’s position on the basic question of the historical role of the peasantry in bourgeois and socialist revolutions, on the attitude of socialists to land distribution, and on the means for making agricultural production co-operative. However, on the prospects of small farming versus large farming as the process of industrialism proceeded – a question of prime importance for the whole problem – Kautsky and Lenin, the two main exponents of a Marxist analysis of agricultural economics, held a position which was more ambivalent than Marx’s; they were much less definite about the victory of large over small farming consequent upon capitalist development.

5. Kautsky

Soon after the appearance of the Third Volume of Capital in 1894, Marx’s theory of the concentration of capital in agriculture and the victory of large over small farming came under attack from the German “Revisionists”, Eduard Bernstein and Eduard David. To support their argument they used the German population census of 1895 which showed that since the previous census of 1882 small and medium farms had lost no ground at all.

The foremost Marxist theoretician of the time, Karl Kautsky, dealt with the problem in Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question), 1889, which is the most important and elaborate work ever published on the subject. While vehemently attacking Bernstein and David, Kautsky in practice shifted radically from Marxs’ concept regarding the withering away of the small farm under capitalism.

Kautsky began with an acceptance of the existence of basic differences between the paths of capitalist development in agriculture and in industry:

There is not the slightest doubt – we are prepared to accept this a priori – that agriculture does not develop according to the pattern in industry: it is subject to special laws. [12]

There are branches of agriculture, he argued, in which small production can compete successfully with large production; for example, vegetable gardening, vine growing, etc. [13] But these branches occupy a position subordinate to the principal branches of agriculture – grain and livestock. And in the latter sectors “large-scale production is decidedly superior to small production.” [14]

He went on to enumerate factors which made large-scale farming superior to small-scale. The large farm saves on animals, implements, houses, etc, per unit of land. The smaller the agricultural area, the larger the relative portion of land lost on boundary demarcations. The large farm uses absolutely more equipment, and can therefore turn a more advanced division of labour to better advantage. It derives far greater benefit from the specialisation of machinery and other equipment than the small farm, and there is certain machinery that it alone can use. The same applies to livestock. The small farmer uses a cow in numerous ways: milking, draft work and breeding. Specialisation of livestock is possible only in large farms. As regards specialisation and co-operation of labour, the large farm again has decisive advantages over the small. It can employ specialists. [15] it keeps workshops beyond the means of the small farm for the repair of machinery and the making of simple implements. [16] It can arrange buildings and organise irrigation to better advantage than the small farm. [17] Above all, “The more capitalistic agriculture becomes, the more it develops the qualitative difference between the technique of small production and that of large-scale production.” [18]

Added to the advantages of the large farm in the sphere of production are many more in the field of trade and credit.

There is no field in which the advantages of the large farm over the small one are greater than in that of trade. [19]

The position of the small farmer among the sellers and buyers in the market is very weak. His knowledge of the market situation is poor; his ability to take advantage of favourable, or safeguard himself in advance against unfavourable, circumstances is minimal. To make matters more difficult, his dealings in the market, unlike those of the small artisan, are very varied. While a shoemaker needs to buy, besides implements, only leather, nails, and cord, and sells only shoes, a farmer, in addition to equipment, has to buy livestock, seeds, fodder, fertilisers, insecticides, etc, and to sell livestock, grain, milk, butter, eggs, etc. “There is no other art as dependent on trade as his.’ This dependence is most binding when the trader is also the usurer and when the farmer is compelled, in order to pay his debts, to sell his goods at any price. [20]

But Kautsky argues that there are some important factors which prevent the complete victory of large farming over small. First, the use of machinery encounters greater difficulties in agriculture than in industry, partly for technical reasons connected with the layout of the land, etc, partly because of the seasonal nature of agriculture, which makes it relatively more expensive to keep machinery, and partly because low wages in agriculture make the use of machinery less profitable than it would be were wages higher. [21]

Second, the cost of internal transport, and the wastage it, too, involves, tends to limit the optimal size of the farm more than in the case of industrial plant. [22]

Third, the more intensive the farm, the more important is the transport factor in restricting the optimal size of the farm, owing to the greater amount of fertilisers, seeds, etc., which have to be transported per unit of land. [23]

Fourth, the larger the farm, the higher the cost of supervising labour. Under capitalism, for which strict labour supervision is necessary, this factor is important in limiting the size of the farm. [24]

Fifth, as the main source of labour for the large farm is the offspring of the small farmers, if the number of small farms goes down, the supply of labour power to the large farms dwindles. [25] A shortage of workers due to emigration of the rural population compels the big landowners to allot land to the agricultural workers in order to create a small peasantry which will then provide labour power for the landlords. (Marx actually mentioned this factor in an article in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as early as 1850, as a limitation on the growth of large farming.)

A sixth factor helping to preserve the small farm is the policy of capitalist governments, which, increasingly threatened by socialism, try to bolster up the small farms as a factor of social conservatism and stability. [26]

And seventh, a feature distinguishing agriculture from industry is the natural limit to the supply of land, the most important agricultural means of production. In industry there is no such natural limit to an increase in the quantity of means of production. There the accumulation of capital, that is, the use of part of the profit to, increase the means of production, can be carried out independently of the concentration of capital, that is, the concentration of many capitals into a small number of agglomerated masses. And this accumulation usually precedes concentration. The large capital becomes larger and larger until it undermines the independence of the small capitals. This undermining is generally the result and not the prerequisite of the creation of large capital – in order to build a shoe factory one does not have to start with the expropriation of the small shoemakers. The situation in agriculture is just the opposite: entirely dependent on land as it is, the expropriation of the small farms, moreover in a continuous area, is a precondition for the building up of a large farm. Thus the private ownership of the land hampers the concentration and accumulation of capital in agriculture. [27]

All these factors, however, could only retard the victory of large over small farming for a time. But there is one paramount factor, according to Kautsky, which prevents the disappearance of the small farm, and which overshadows all the others. After arguing the case for the overall technical superiority of large-scale production in agriculture, he asks, “What can small production set off against the advantage of large-scale production?” And he replies:

The greater diligence and greater care of the worker who, unlike the hired labourer, works for himself, and the low level of requirements of the small independent farmer which is even lower than that of the agricultural labourer. [28]

Not only the small farmer himself, but his children too, are made to toil to the limit. [29] Their willingness to work day and night, a willingness not characteristic of the agricultural labourer, is of particular importance in the busy seasons. [30] Kautsky goes on to quote a large number of facts from France, England and Germany to support the argument that overwork and undernourishment are the main bulwark of small farming.

6. Lenin

Lenin accepted Kautsky’s Die Agrarfrage without reservation, and his theoretical writings on the subject of large versus small farms were largely repetitions and elaborations of Kautsky’s arguments aided by new statistical data. Any deviations from Kautsky were in the direction of greater emphasis on the ruination of small farming under capitalism. Thus he wrote:

... the fundamental and main trend of capitalism is the elimination of small production by large-scale production both in industry and in agriculture. But this process must not be taken only in the sense of immediate expropriation. this elimination process also includes a process of ruination, of deterioration of the conditions of farming of the small farmers which may extend over years and decades. This deterioration manifests itself in overwork or underfeeding of the small farmer; in an increased burden of debt; in the deterioration of cattle fodder and the condition of the cattle in general; in the deterioration of the methods of cultivating and manuring the land; in the stagnation of technical progress, etc. [31]

And again:

Small production in agriculture is doomed to extinction and to an incredibly crushed, oppressed position under capitalism ... Being dependent on big capital, and being backward compared with large-scale production in agriculture, small production can hold on only because of the desperately reduced consumption and laborious, arduous toil. The dispersion and waste of human labour, the worst forms of dependence of the producer, exhaustion of the strength of the peasant family, of peasant cattle and peasant land – this is what capitalism brings to the peasant everywhere. [32]

7. The stubborn facts

Whatever the factors working for or against the survival of small farms, the march of two centuries of capitalism has shown in uncontrovertible form that agriculture did not follow industry in concentrating the major portion of production in a small number of farm units. Even accepting all Kautsky’s and Lenin’s arguments, the decisive fact remains: the production unit in agriculture is extremely small, large-scale production is not predominant, agriculture as a whole is atomised into millions of relatively tiny units of production. And as years pass into generations, the small farms show no inclination to disappear.

In Britain, for instance, the country of large-scale farming par excellence, which served as a model for Marx’s study of capitalist agriculture, the concentration in farming is very far behind that in manufacturing industry. It is estimated that in 1957 some 77 per cent of regular full-time workers in England and Wales were on farms employing fewer than 11 people, and 53 per cent were in units with fewer than 5. The following table compares the concentration in a branch of industry and in agriculture:

In fact, since Marx wrote Capital, the number of wage earners in British agriculture has not increased either absolutely or relatively compared with the number of farms, but on the contrary has considerably declined. The total number of farms in Britain recorded in 1851 was 303,000, while in 1951 it was practically the same, 302,000. Meanwhile the number of agricultural contract workers declined from 1,473,000 to 544,000. [34] The distribution of farm staffs in England and Wales in 1851 and 1951 was as follows:

Number of regular
workers per farm

Per cent of Workers

1851

1941

1

5.0

13.2

2

8.4

17.1

3

7.8

12.9

4

8.5

9.6

5-6

11.6

12.1

7-9

11.9

10.0

10-19

24.7

13.1

20 and over

22.1

12.0

In 1851, 18.6 per cent of the farms had regular staffs of five or more workers and there were 16,500 farms with 10 or more workers. In 1941 only 8.3 per cent of the farms employed five or more workers, while the number of farms employing 10 or more workers was reduced to 6,800. At the other end of the scale the number of farms staffed entirely by the occupier and his wife with one regular worker in addition increased from 117,700 in 1851 to 192,800 in 1941. [35]

In other capitalist countries too there are few wage workers in agriculture. Thus, for instance, in Austria, 79 per cent of the total farm labour force, according to the 1951 census, was accounted for by owners of holdings and members of their families, and only 21 per cent consisted of hired labourers. The corresponding figures for Ireland were 85 and 15 per cent. [36] In Germany the corresponding figures (in 1933) were 76 and 24 per cent. [37] In France, the 1954 census revealed that out of 5.1 million people engaged in agriculture, only 1.2 million, or some 23.5 per cent, were farm labourers. [38]

It is true there are vast corporation and other farms in the United States, which control the major part of the sale of farm products. But even here the small unit is incomparably more stubborn than in industry. Thus in 1950, out of a total labour force of 10.4 millions in agriculture in USA, only 2.3 millions, or 17.4 per cent [1*] , were hired workers. It was estimated that there was an average of 1.5 million male wage and salary workers in agriculture, compared with 4.1 million male farmers, and 0.7 million male members of farmers’ families working in agriculture. Thus, only 24 per cent [1*] of all males engaged in agriculture were wage or salary workers. [39]

Moreover, the number of wage workers in US agriculture has declined more quickly than the number of farmers. Thus between 1929 and 1948 the number of people employed in US agriculture declined from 11.3 million to 10.7 million, or by 5.3 per cent, while the number of hired workers declined from 2.98 millions to 2.31 millions, or by 22.5 per cent. [40]

If one accepts Lenin’s contention, in his discussion of American agriculture, that the volume of hired labour is the most direct indication of the development of capitalist operations in agriculture, then it must be argued that while capitalism in general has advanced, capitalism in agriculture has hardly advanced at all, in fact has even retreated in the most advanced industrial countries.

Now, as we have seen, one of the basic assumptions underlying Marx’s policy for the socialist transformation of agriculture was the great superiority of large farming over small, a superiority which would lead to the existence of a considerable sector of farms under capitalism that would serve as a point of support for the general process of making farm production co-operative after the socialist revolution. The above facts undermine this assumption.

7. To avoid misunderstanding, it should be said that the above deals with Marx’s concept of the role of the peasantry in the socialist revolution. As regards the peasantry’s role in the anti-feudal, capitalist revolution, Marx’s concept was radically different. Contrary to the conservative, even reactionary role played by the peasantry in the socialist, anti-capitalist revolution, Marx showed that a peasantry oppressed by feudalism plays an entirely different part in a revolution directed to the overthrow of this social order. Whereas the proletarian revolution characterises the death-agony of capitalism, it is the peasant revolution that accompanies the death-agony of feudalism and the rise of capitalism – Wat Tyler in England, Thomas Münzer in Germany, Pugachev and Stenka Razin in Russia. And in this revolution the peasantry as a class plays a progressive, revolutionary role.

38.The Relation of Land Tenure to the Economic and Social Development of Agriculture, M. Sering, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of Agricultural Economists, OUP, 1957, p.77; The Economist, 12 March 1960.

39.The Relationship between the BAE Level-of-Living Indexes and the Average Income of Farm Operators, V.W. Ruttan, Journal of Farm Economics, February 1954.

40.Economics of Agricultural Production and Resource Use, E.O. Heady, New York, 1952, p.694.

Note by REDS – Die Roten

1*. These figures are incorrect. The percentages should be 22.1% and 31.3% respectively. This error does not change the substantive argument in any way.